About Rationally Speaking

Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Truth from fiction: truth or fiction?

Literature teaches us about life. Literature helps us understand the world.

I'm sure you've heard these claims before, and maybe you agree with them. It's practically a truism that one of the reasons literature is valuable -- worth writing, reading, studying, and promoting -- is that it's not just entertaining, but that it actually teaches us profound lessons about the world, and about human nature. But does it?

I recently read How Fiction Works, by James Wood, a book I strongly recommend for its analysis of writing techniques, of what works stylistically and what doesn't. But towards the end of the book Wood makes the case that fiction is a good source of knowledge about the world. A representative example: "Consider -- just to pluck one kind of struggle -- what extraordinary empirical insight the novel has given us into marriage and all its conflicts," he writes.

As far as I can tell, this belief in truth-from-fiction is the party line for those who champion the merits of literature. Eminent English professor and critic Harold Bloom proclaims, in his bestselling How to Read and Why, that one of the main reasons to read literature is because "we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are."

But why would we expect literature to be a reliable source of knowledge about "the way things are"? After all, the narratives which are the most gripping and satisfying to read are not the most representative of how the world actually works. They have dramatic resolutions, foreshadowing, conflict, climax, and surprise. People tend to get their comeuppance after they misbehave. People who pursue their dream passionately tend to succeed. Disaster tends to strike when you least expect it. These narratives are over-represented in literature because they're more gratifying to read; why would we expect to learn from them about "the way things are"?

And even if authors were all trying to faithfully represent the world as they perceived it, why would we expect their perceptions to be any more universally true than anyone else's? Just like the rest of us, authors see a limited slice of the world, made up of their own experiences and the re-told experiences of their acquaintances. There's no reason we should expect that slice of the world to be a representative one. (In fact, we might instead expect the world we see in literature to be systematically biased by the traits characteristic of writers. Not to paint with too broad a brush here, but I'd be willing to bet that writers are more sensitive and more introverted than average. And although I can't predict exactly how each of those traits would bias their representation of the world, it seems likely that they would bias it somehow.)

So I can't see any reason to give any more weight to the implicit arguments of a novel than we would give to the explicit arguments of any individual person. And yet when we read a novel or study it in school, especially if it's a hallowed classic, we tend to treat its arguments as truths. At least in my experience, the conclusions people tend to draw from classic novels are more of the form "The Great Gatsby shows the hollowness of the American dream," rather than, "The Great Gatsby shows that F. Scott Fitzgerald believed the American dream to be hollow."

For that matter, how can we tell whether a novel's portrayal of the world is "truthful" or "realistic"? People certainly tend to feel like they can tell. Wood writes, "Kafka's Metamorphosis and Hamsun's Hunger and Beckett's Endgame are... harrowingly truthful texts. This, we say to ourselves, is what it would feel like to be outcast from one's family, like an insect (Kafka), or a young madman (Hamsun) or an aged parent kept in a bin and fed pap (Beckett)."

But whether you finish a book and say to yourself, "That's exactly what it would be like," or "That's not at all what it would be like," what are you basing that judgment on? All you have to evaluate a book's portrayal of the world by are your pre-existing perceptions. So if the novel's portrayal of the world matches what you already believe, then you deem it "truthful." But then how can a novel ever teach us something new about the world that we don't already believe?

It's also worth keeping in mind that whether or not something feels realistic isn't necessarily a good indicator of whether it is realistic. In fact, experiments have revealed a common cognitive bias that leads people to judge an event as being more likely if it's described in more detail. For instance, during the Cold War, psychologists Tversky and Kahneman asked political leaders to estimate the probability of (1) the U.S. withdrawing its ambassador from the U.S.S.R., and (2) the U.S.S.R. invading Poland and then, as a result, the U.S. withdrawing its ambassador from the U.S.S.R. People rated (2) as more likely. Of course, (2) is a subset of (1), and is therefore by definition less likely. But because it has a narrative built in, it feels more plausible.

Science fiction is especially good at making us feel like we've learned a lesson about the world, because it's perfectly suited to "What would happen if..." questions that vividly portray the consequences of a particular course of action. And it's easy to confuse "this is one theoretically possible outcome that could result" with "this is the outcome that will result."

My brother Jesse Galef unearthed a striking example of this phenomenon. George W. Bush read (uh, technically, his advisor read to him) passages from Aldous Huxley's dystopic science fiction novel, Brave New World. "'We're tinkering with the boundaries of life here,' Bush said when I finished. “We’re on the edge of a cliff. And if we take a step off the cliff, there’s no going back. Perhaps we should only take one step at a time.”" His conclusion: we should avoid stem-cell research.

But as Jesse points out:

Aldous Huxley had a vision of how society interacts with technological advances. He thought such a scenario would lead to hatcheries, deception, and nightmarish conditions. That possibility scared Bush into a position on stem-cell research. So? Huxley has no particular authority on the subject. Someone else could come along and write a story about a world in which technology creates excellent living conditions! If someone had read that story to Bush, maybe he would have gladly supported research.

I've also come to suspect that even when we're not explicitly trying to learn about the world from fiction, it seeps into our unconscious anyway, and starts to bias our sense of "the way things are." We form our general impressions of how things work in the world from a jumble of accumulated experiences -- our own, along with secondhand experiences that we've read and heard about. And my suspicion is that when we read fictional stories, our memories of them get automatically added to that jumble. Thus, when we ask ourselves questions like, "What's likely to happen when I pursue this girl who seems out of my league, or quit this job to chase my dream, or commit this crime?" we're basing our answer not just on the real examples of similar situations we've heard of, but also, unwittingly, on the ones we've read about in fiction.

I've definitely noticed this tendency in myself. A while ago I realized that I had the habit of thinking, on some not-quite-conscious level, "Let me imagine as many things that could go wrong as possible, because if I think of them ahead of time then they won't happen." Where did that superstition come from? My guess is, from fiction. A satisfying disaster, narratively, is one that is unexpected. So my brain reasoned: "Disasters tend not to be anticipated, so if I anticipate something then that means it won't happen."

I'd be genuinely curious to hear if you, or anyone you know, has actually learned something profound about the world or human nature from literature. Remember, it must be both true, and also something you didn't already know before reading the novel. It seems logically impossible to me, based on the reasons I outlined above, but perhaps I'll realize an error in my reasoning if someone can give me a counterexample.

An embarrassing footnote: I very nearly ended this essay by giving you an example of how literature skews our view of the world -- Emma Bovary, in Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, who reads too many melodramatic novels as a young girl and proceeds to evaluate her adult life by the standards of fiction, viewing her everyday life as dull, and passion as paramount, which gets her in a heap of trouble. See? I was going to say. Emma Bovary's experience shows the problem with using fictional stories as a guide to how things really --

...and then, of course, the absurdity of my argument finally hit me, like a ton of circular bricks.

53 comments:

When I was studying literature at university (just under a decade ago) we were always taught to look at a text as a particular individual's take on events, with all the possible distortions that come with it, rather than as a factual report. Context is everything.

Complicated... no easy answers. There are authors who do a lot of research and can convey a lot about the way people lived 800 years ago when writing a fictional story in a historical setting. And the minimum you learn in any case is the opinion of the author on the topic of the novel, which may not be naked information so much, but at least a different perspective to ponder. And if the author is somebody from a long time ago, like Shakespeare or Marlowe, I certainly gain a lot from that.

Probably the more problematic question is how many of the readers are able to differentiate between fact and fiction when evaluating literature, and how many follow a confirmation bias in reading only those authors whose points of view they agree with anyway.

What you are missing is that no matter what, people WILL make sense of the world through stories. That's how we humans are. The real question is then WHICH stories do they use. One definition of "literature" is something with enough subtlety and nuance to be valuable. As opposed to trashy books following closely to a well-worn script.

Potential advantages of telling stories via literature are the powerful suspension of disbelief, and empathy with characters unlike oneself. These can increase the range of stories that one understands.

Literature can also help crystallize aspects of people's lives that are unclear to themselves. For example, I recently lent a copy of Netherland to a friend whose long-term relationship was disintegrating, and who wasn't sure whether he wanted to save it. Reading a nuanced, delicate portrayal of a similar situation doesn't automatically mean that he will make the same decisions as the characters. But it can still help his process of introspection and shed insight onto his feelings and motivations.

I may be wrong, but I get the sense you are conflating "teaches us about life" and "understanding the world" with factual information.

I agree with those statements that fiction can teach me about live and help my understanding of the world. When I read Anthem, 1984, and Brave New World I learned different ideas about the world, technology, government, etc. To Kill a Mockingbird and Native Son opened my eyes to racism in a way that I hadn't previously entertained. I do not think these stories (nor many others I read) taught me "if this, then that" information, but the authors are able to use the narrative to give me an experience I would not have had by myself, and that is knowledge and understanding in my book.

Personally, I kind of find the approach you discuss extremely superficial, and I think your Bush vs Brave New World example is a perfect example of that superficiality.

I would be interested to know if anyone else has the viewpoint that you do on how fiction promotes understanding. I never thought of it in this way and when I've heard the cliches you used to start, I never thought of them like this.

In this case I tend to agree with most of what Julia wrote. We certainly can't get *truths* about the world out of fiction. That seems like a no-brainer, despite literary critics' claims to the contrary.

Still, literature does teach a lot, in a broader sense of "teaching." I think of a good novel as of a thought experiment about certain aspects of human life. Of course it's an experiment based on the particular premises of the author, but the idea is to make the reader feel and think about the situations, characters, and emotions involved. In that sense, there is plenty to learn about the realities of being human.

I'm having some difficulty grasping your points here. Why is "The Great Gatsby shows that F. Scott Fitzgerald believed the American dream to be hollow" more accurate than "The Great Gatsby shows the hollowness of the American dream"? In the first, you are inferring that an author's creation represents the totality of his beliefs on the matter. In the second, you are stating what you believe to be the lesson of the author's creation. That seems a far more legitimate claim.

When I read The Quiet American many years ago, it struck me as a more convincing and compelling exploration of how the U.S. became enmeshed in Vietnam than anything I had read previously. Of course, it was written well before the war, so I would hardly be able to make the claim that Greene was setting out to do any such thing.

More recently, reading The Ghost Map, it struck me that overwhelmingly my impressions of what life in mid-19th-Century London must've been like came from reading a lot of Dickens's novels and stories in my youth. And nothing I read in The Ghost Map contradicted those impressions, or caused me to revise them in any way. That doesn't necessarily mean that I know the "truth" of what life was like there and then, but it is probably as close as I'm going to get.

Emma Bovary's experience does show the problems with using fictional stories as a guide to how things really are or were. The fact that she is a fictional character doesn't make that any less true, if that is the truth you take away from your experience with her.

1. The case par excellence of trying to learn how things are by reading fiction is Don Quixote, going nuts over chivalric novels. He has the books burnt at the end, coming to his senses on his deathbed. Sancho is the embodiment of reason and truth, based on empirical evidence and unfazed by fantasy (except when fooled into becoming governor of a non existent island).

2. The distinction between fiction and science, as drawn here by Julia and Massimo's comment, is quite clear. However, much post modern discourse about science confuses the two, arguing that 'scientific discourse' is also the view of a particular individual (the scientist), lacking any general validity or relation to reality. Since post modernism started (and still flourishes) in literary studies and English departments (out of its original Vavilov site on the Seine's Left Bank), the treatment of scientific texts as just another 'narrative' may have come quite naturally, to the great detriment of the understanding of science.

I think that much fiction provides great insight and ultimately "truths" about the human condition in much the way that philosophy does. And just like philosophy it is the point of view of one person. But I don't think that means that truths are not possible.

Gatsby may be Fitzgerald's opinion about the American Dream but that does not mean there is no truth to be gleaned from that opinion. Of course we are not talking about absolute truth but certainly there is consensus.

Fiction can often be a vehicle for the expression of ideas about the real world and IMHO can often have more clarity and impact than non-fiction.

Beth, there is a fundamental distinction here. Literature is, by nature, an arbitrary invention of the human mind. So what we learn from literature is what another human mind wants to communicate.

Philosophy is about discovering logical truths (logic, after all, is a branch of philosophy), which means that yes, it can discover new things. And no, philosophy isn't just one person's opinion (a common misconception), in the same sense (albeit less rigorous) in which math (or logic itself) is not one person's opinion.

Doesn't that depend on what the purpose of the treatise might be? Not all philosophy is written from that standpoint is it? Certainly the great philosophers of the past are expressing their own take on the human experience?

I also don't think that literature "is, by nature, an arbitrary invention of the human mind."

As I just wrote to a friend:

1. Historical novels are a wonderful way to learn about the past.

2. Many of the writers I read go to great lengths to research whatever they are writing about and I have learned a great deal of science, history, philosophy, etc from novels.

I have also experienced great insights from fiction when it is at it's best.

Beth, all good philosophy should be written that way (I'm not sympathetic at all toward continental, essay-style, obscure and fuzzy thinking philosophy - then again, there is plenty of bad scientific literature out there...).

As for learning history from novels, I think that's a bad idea, because there is always a blurred (and not explicit) line between reality and fiction. And this comes from someone who both loves history and reads a lot of historical novels...

the idea is that philosophy - when well done - is about rigorous arguments based on logic. Logic does not necessarily lead to a unique and indisputable conclusion (but that's true also of science, and even of math), but it certainly isn't a situation where whatever opinion is as good as whatever other opinion. (Unless you are a postmodernist, that is...)

"After all, the narratives which are the most gripping and satisfying to read are not the most representative of how the world actually works."

Julia, I wonder how you feel about Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." The book is largely a work of fiction, though it is based on Sinclair's observations, which he gathered while living amongst food factory workers. The book portrayed better than any non-fiction work did (or probably could have) the horrid food and worker safety conditions in factories in the early 20th century. Which is precisely why it had the great impact that it did. I'm not sure your thesis can hold until you deal with books of this nature, specifically The Jungle, which I think sits atop most others in this regard. At the very least, The Jungle led lawmakers to investigate what was going on. And in the end, they found precisely what was described in Sinclair's book.

"As for learning history from novels, I think that's a bad idea, because there is always a blurred (and not explicit) line between reality and fiction. And this comes from someone who both loves history and reads a lot of historical novels..."

Massimo, do you know Ryszard Kapuściński? In particular I am speaking of his book Shah of Shahs, which details his experiences in Iran after the 1979 revolution, and his analysis of the situation. I wrote a paper on the book, specifically about why it is a perfect example of why learning history from novels -- or, as Shah of Shahs is, journalistic literary non-fiction -- is such a minefield.

Much of what Kapuściński writes is unsubstantiated. The book is made of his interactions and views of what's going on. But it's not even that it is Kapuściński's point of view -- one can't even be sure he didn't make up half the book. The reader is essentially asked to trust the writer outright. And many, unfortunately, do. But why ought we trust the writer? Because he was a good journalist for so long? So while one thinks he or she is getting an insider's glimpse into what happened on the ground post-revolution, one can't be sure what he or she is reading has any truth behind it whatsoever. So you are left to go to the real history books -- which, of course, do not include much of Kapuściński's type of writing. His type of writing is alluring for the sort of information it provides, but the information is questionable, hence, we're stuck in a minefield.

I recently read The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera, and he said something to the effect that characters in real life are born of flesh and blood, whereas characters in a novel are born of an event, in his case the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. But I think his deeper meaning is that characters in a novel are vehicles for whatever vision the author is attempting to communicate and probably bear little relationship to real-life characters. Vonnegut is even more extreme and calls his own characters cartoons, and openly eschews any attempt to make them "rounded".

"It remains that the largest and richest store of reflection on all questions of importance about the good life for humankind is literature - the novels, poems, plays, and essays that distil and debate the experience of mankind in its richest variety. It does not matter whether a literature work is tendentious or not, that is, urges a point of view or enjoins a way of life; from that point of view literature is a Babel of competing opinions and outlooks. For the earnest enquirer that is a good thing, because the more viewpoints, perspectives and experiences that come as grist to his mill through the medium of literature, the more chance he has of expanding his understanding, refining his sympathies, and considering his options. That is the great service of attentive and thoughtful reading: it educates and extends the moral imagination, affording insight into - and therefore the chance to be more tolerant of - other lives, other ways, other choices, most of which one will probably never directly experience oneself. And tolerance is a virtue which no list of virtues could well be without, and without which no human existence could be complete or good."

Maybe "literature" is a bit broad of a word here. All written text is literature of one form or another - philosophy texts certainly are. I think a better word is "fiction." A slightly better question then becomes: can fiction teach us truths about the world?

I think it depends on what you mean by teach.

Fiction is not attempting to pose truths about the world. Unlike philosophical texts, which purport to pose truths about the world, fiction purports to pose falsity. To the extent that a philosophical text succeeds, it will teach its reader truths, at least provisionally. A work of fiction, in an opposite fashion, reveals truths only where it fails to convincingly portray falsity.

Failures in deception don't happen because of the text - at least not by the text alone - but because of the reader. The work of fiction has not taught the reader anything, but rather, the reader has learned, by virtue of the text's failure, something about themselves and their orientation toward the world.

This is why living by fiction alone will make a lunatic of you, but living without it robs you of an opportunity to know yourself.

You say: "A while ago I realized that I had the habit of thinking, on some not-quite-conscious level, "Let me imagine as many things that could go wrong as possible, because if I think of them ahead of time then they won't happen.

Many researchers and therapists will tell you that this kind of worst-case planning is healthy and natural, a by-product of combining our ability for abstract through with our natural tendency to protect ourself. When you play out the worst case, you prepare strategies to manage your way through, consciously or not.

Also, as many of the comments have pointed out, stories are an essential way that we make sense out of the world around us. Fiction is one form of story telling -- once upon a time it was myth, or folklore or religion that supplied the stories. We use stories to escape, to learn, to validate, to transfer culture memes, to establish understanding. It's neither true nor honest nor real...it's a way of managing the complex information about our world.

Beth, there is a fundamental distinction here. Literature is, by nature, an arbitrary invention of the human mind. So what we learn from literature is what another human mind wants to communicate.

Philosophy is about discovering logical truths (logic, after all, is a branch of philosophy), which means that yes, it can discover new things. And no, philosophy isn't just one person's opinion (a common misconception), in the same sense (albeit less rigorous) in which math (or logic itself) is not one person's opinion...The Massimo chapters are pretty good too. I don't think philosophy is all that dissimilar from literature--especially with serious literature that means to do more than entertain or express authorial whim. Philosophy frequently makes use of fiction, with thought experiments, analogies, and illustrative examples. Literature, similarly, frequently voices explicit argument. "It is not worth one single small tear of even one tortured little child that beat its breast with its little fist..."

Storytelling and argumentation, too, tread similar paths. Act One, introduction of premises and assumptions. Act Two, construction with the preceding: (1) and (3) therefore (5), (2) and (5) therefore (6). This builds to Act Three, when insightful conclusions are reached. Sometimes it's a single conclusion, "the moral of the story."

Humans are story telling creatures. We learn about living in our society "Around the campfire" from fables and stories all of which are fictional. A powerful fictional story works not because of the characters or what happens to them but because the social structures they are embedded in provide meaningful social information whether we agree with it or not. Several of the novels mentioned above, "Gone With the Wind," "Grapes of Wrath," "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," among many others all provided depictions of a social ethic which whether we agreed with it or not, was part of the social fabric in which we live or could live.

Probably the best philosophy course I took was entitled "Philosophy from Literature." Starting with Homer, and stopping off every few hundred years until we reached James Joyce's Ulysses. The basic premise of the course was what can you learn about your society from the literature of various past societies?

Wired for War author, PW Singer, explained how science fiction inspired modern weapons.1. It got kids interested in science and technology.2. Some science fiction writers are scientists themselves, so they know how things are and can be.3. Products are pitched to the customer by comparing them to science fiction, such as Star Wars.

The basic power of literature is its ability to transform us in some significant way. Sometimes this transformation [or part of it] is that we learned something about how the world functions and sometimes its not.

But I sense that the reason you are reluctant to accept literature as teacher is because you have too narrow a view about what/how we can learn.

If the only things one can learn about how the world functions are propositional in nature, then your view is probably correct. But since that supposition is flawed, so is your skepticism about learning from literature.

Logicians say there are three kinds of truth: 1) necessary - truths that can't possibly be false ("there's no greatest prime number"); 2) contingent - actually true, but could have been false ("Bush won the 2008 election"); 3) possible - could have been true, whether it's actually true or not ("Kerry won the 2008 election"). Fiction presents (mainly but not only) possible truth; which, as Aristotle noted (Poetics 9) poetry [literature, fiction] shows us "not something that has happened, but the kind of thing that might happen." That is, knowledge (often in-depth) of possibilities & potentials, which is valuable for emotional, political, and moral life. To some extent history provides that also, but rarely with the insight, vividness, and detail found in good fiction.

Massimo, you said: "I think of a good novel as of a thought experiment about certain aspects of human life. Of course it's an experiment based on the particular premises of the author, but the idea is to make the reader feel and think about the situations, characters, and emotions involved. In that sense, there is plenty to learn about the realities of being human."

Well, I'd say the purpose of a thought experiment is either(1) to show us what WOULD happen under certain conditions (e.g., Galileo's gravity thought experiment)...or (2) to clarify our own feelings or attitudes about something (e.g., the different variants of the trolley car thought experiment show us how our reactions change when certain things are varied, like the action necessary to save the children on the tracks).

I could see novels performing #2 to an extent, but I wouldn't call that "learning about the realities of being human," as you said, or "learning about the way things are," as Bloom said. I would call that learning about my own attitudes. (And even then, my reactions can be very influenced by the way the author portrays situations and characters in the narrative, which makes novels rather dangerous to use as thought experiments. A different fictional outcome could lead the reader to a totally different "realization" about his own attitudes.)

Michael de Dora, you wrote: "I'm not sure your thesis can hold until you deal with books of this nature, specifically The Jungle... At the very least, The Jungle led lawmakers to investigate what was going on. And in the end, they found precisely what was described in Sinclair's book."

Well, I think semi-fictional stories are tricky -- the closer they hew to well-substantiated facts, the more we can trust them, but then the less they count as fiction. The only way to confirm whether the things you read in novels reflect reality is to perform independent investigations, as they did with the Jungle -- but then what did you really learn from: the novel, or your investigations of reality?

I guess I would say that a novel "based on real life" like the Jungle should be treated as if it carries the disclaimer, "Some of this is roughly true" -- and if we want to be more confident than that, we need independent, non-fiction sources.

Joanna Masel said, "Literature can also help crystallize aspects of people's lives that are unclear to themselves. For example, I recently lent a copy of Netherland to a friend whose long-term relationship was disintegrating, and who wasn't sure whether he wanted to save it. Reading a nuanced, delicate portrayal of a similar situation doesn't automatically mean that he will make the same decisions as the characters. But it can still help his process of introspection and shed insight onto his feelings and motivations."

I agree this is one of the ways people use literature, and I agree that it could theoretically help someone make a decision in their own life. But it also seems like there are so many opportunities for it to influence your choice unjustifiably.

Even if you see a parallel between your real-life situation and a situation in the novel, your post-reading conclusion about what to do in your own life will likely be influenced by whether the fictional character's choices turned out well, or poorly... or by whether the character is more or less likable... right? Unless you believe that all the different possible ways the story could've been written would have lead your friend to the same conclusion about what he should do in his own life.

The point is that if my friend did NOT read the work of literature, he would still be influenced by many voices that have no greater justification. For example, he may be influenced by his internal narrative about other couples he knows, especially family members, and how staying together or separating worked out for them. These too are stories, in part fictional in his reconstruction of them. Or he may be influenced by the blunt advice of a friend who sees a resemblance between his situation and one that they were once in. The novel is less forceful than that, and allows for more gentle introspection.

My point is that if you skip the literature, you need to ask what internal narratives replace it? Hard, cold, objective, unbiased rationality is a rather unlikely candidate. In a sense, this is just one more of the multitude of stories one can tell, very valuable, but not to be consulted in isolation. There are aspects to the state of being human that are not fully described by our intellects.

To unashamedly finish with a fictional example, the main character in Crime and Punishment decides that on rational grounds, his planned murder is both morally acceptable, given the unpleasant nature of the victim, and in his own interests. But he fails to factor in his non-rational reaction to his own crime, and his inability to live with himself afterwards manifests in various ways, ultimately leading to his conviction.

"I agree this is one of the ways people use literature, and I agree that it could theoretically help someone make a decision in their own life. But it also seems like there are so many opportunities for it to influence your choice unjustifiably." - Julia

The same can be said of language in general. Should we abandon language?

I think fiction minimizes the risks you're concerned with. For example, we can take J.G.Ballard, a great speculator - semi-clairvoyant in his predictions - whose efforts could not have been proposed in a genre less dangerous than fiction. Should he have written future-histories, or sorta-science?

You might think speculation is too dangerous to advertise as truth-containing, but what's the point of speculation if you don't take it seriously? None.

Perhaps we might wonder if speculation is necessary at all. I would argue it is. We can't even form questions, in whose honour we conduct empirical investigations, without speculation. Speculation is a necessary risk, and so is all fiction.

It gets dicey when fiction speculates on matters we're incapable of pursuing empirically - like J.G.Ballard's work. Sadly, in these cases, all we have are fictional speculations and imagination. Worse still, our empirical impotence doesn't make these considerations any less necessary.

We're stuck with fiction one way or another. I prefer to label it as such.

...on the other hand, I have heard people evoke a piece of fiction as "evidence" of some non-literary phenomenon. These are uncomfortable moments for me.

you seem to be making a distinction between learning about aspects of the human condition (the way I put it) and learning about the perspective of a particular author (the way you put it). Isn't the considered perspective of an author part of learning about the human condition?

I think one can learn a great deal about history from novels, though not in the way discussed above. Don't forget that literature itself is a part of history; a bestseller from the eighteenth century, for example, constitutes an important piece of historical evidence about the interests and concerns of eighteenth-century readers.

The above raises another question: how old does a work if literature have to be to count as historical evidence? Not old at all, I suspect...

kur said: "If the only things one can learn about how the world functions are propositional in nature, then your view is probably correct. But since that supposition is flawed, so is your skepticism about learning from literature."Kur, can you give me an example of something one could learn about the world that wouldn't be propositional in nature?

phiwilli said that fiction provides, "knowledge (often in-depth) of possibilities & potentials."Phiwilli, what I would say is that fiction provides us with things that are conceivably possible. That is, we can imagine them happening. But beyond that, what can we say? Can we say anything about how realistic or likely the scenario in the novel is? What I was trying to argue in the post was that I think we tend to confuse "this scenario was described convincingly" with "this scenario is the sort of thing that would happen in the real world." But I don't think we can justifiably go from the former to the latter.

Joanna Masel said, "The point is that if my friend did NOT read the work of literature, he would still be influenced by many voices that have no greater justification. For example, he may be influenced by his internal narrative about other couples he knows, especially family members, and how staying together or separating worked out for them. These too are stories, in part fictional in his reconstruction of them."Joanna, do you really think that true accounts, even if viewed through one's inevitable biases, are no more reliable a guide to the way the world works than made-up stories?

Massimo said, "you seem to be making a distinction between learning about aspects of the human condition (the way I put it) and learning about the perspective of a particular author (the way you put it). Isn't the considered perspective of an author part of learning about the human condition?"

Sure it is, but after we hear the author's perspective we have to judge how accurate we think it is, right? And the point I was trying to make is that we need to use external, non-fiction information to judge the accuracy of the author's perspective. So I don't see how one could say we've learned anything new from hearing the author's perspective. ... Well, actually, now that I write that, it occurs to me that maybe in the process of "checking the accuracy" of a novel against your own knowledge about the world, you could end up putting together facts you already knew, in a new way. I can't think of an actual example, but at least it seems theoretically possible now. Hm, I'll have to think more about this!

In my own life, the closest I've come to learning from fiction were scenarios like the following:

1. A character makes some mistakes which, after I read about them, I am hopefully less likely to make in my own life. This could happen because the fiction has made me more aware of (and therefore on the lookout for) certain types of mistakes, or because it has emotionally driven home to me the fact that terrible consequences can result from this type of mistake.

2. A story tells a plausible tale of how a certain type of person came to be the way they are, which helps me become more sympathetic or even empathetic to real people in similar situations. Here I'm using the idea of "learning" pretty loosely.

3. A well researched novel teaches me about the way things used to be in a particular era or in a particular place. While the details are not all going to be correct, the gist of what life was like may well be quite informative and educational.

Given the number of fiction books I've read though, and how infrequent these "learning" experiences are, that doesn't seem like a big payout in terms of learning. Fortunately though, I've gotten a lot of fun out of reading fiction.

I do not think there is an independent reality that is distinct from either our personal realities or from what we might call fiction. I'm sure that calling science another form of literary fiction is a bolder assertion but that also seems correct. Science, as it should for now, presupposes a 'single real world', in which behaviors are always reproducible, given the same set of input or entering conditions.

We can refer to things, events, people, and places, all pointing to a shared world or reality. Of course we have shared literary fiction. But we have private worlds, populated with entities that seem to not be shared, and there is no reason that the value of that perceived reality is lower because there is only one known consumer, not many. And in one's private world, things are always true.